[alsa-devel] [PATCH 3/3] ASoC: AMD: add AMD ASoC ACP-I2S driver [v4]

[Alex Deucher]

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Mark Brown <broonie at kernel.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 07:50:34PM -0400, Alex Deucher wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 7:45 PM, Mark Brown <broonie at kernel.org> wrote:
>
>> > This is not a DRM driver, it is an ASoC driver, and like I say DRM is a
>> > bit special.  I do note that AMD has contributed at least its CCP and
>> > cpufreq drivers (indeed all their non-DRM code I could find with
>> > explicit license statements) under a normal kernel license.  As far as I
>> > can tell this licensing is entirely confined to the DRM drivers.
>
>> > I am not readily able to convince myself that this is compatible with
>> > the intent of exporting the ASoC APIs _GPL(), this looks like it can be
>> > used as the basis for a shim layer for non-GPL code (the licensing
>> > strategy seems very similar).  I'd need to think through this carefully.
>
>> If you have strong concerns, I can double check with our lawyers and
>> see about changing it, I'm just not sure how long that will take :(
>
> I at the very least need to think about this, it's really important to
> me that we don't want to see proprietary drivers.

That's definitely not our intention.  Historically on the GPU side,
we've preferred the X11/MIT license because it lets other projects
like the BSDs more easily leverage our code.

>
>> The licensing tends to vary based on the teams involved.  The ACP
>> audio and i2s was developed by the GPU teams and we've mostly worked
>> on drm and Xorg stuff until now.
>
> For reference the GPL code in the kernel includes at least:
>
>   drivers/crypto/ccp/ccp-crypto-*.c
>   drivers/cpufreq/powernow-k8.c
>   drivers/pinctrl/pinctrl-amd.c
>
> and there's direct contributions from AMD there AFAICT, not just outside
> developers contributing support for AMD chips.

Right, different teams within AMD.  My team has historically only
worked on GPU stuff and since we contributed to Xorg and the drm we've
been approved to release code under the X11/MIT license.

Alex